The life and death of Bussard ramjets in fiction

[james_davis_nicoll]

Heppenheimer's paper came out in the mid-1970s.

Comments

[oh6]

There's nothing like the fourth power of temperature to make one abruptly realize that one's romantic SF concept is a fairy tale.

I guess this is a graph of how long it took people to do the math for themselves, exclaim, "...as bright as the Sun?!" and give up on the idea.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised no one has picked up on pellet propulsion as the way to make the story move fast, fast, fast. OTOH, is there any evidence that most of the people who care about this sort of thing aren't mostly old guard? The younger folk (defined as under 40), are either perfectly comfortable with FTL for plot reasons while acknowledging it's so much nonsense or plain just don't care all that much about fast space travel.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Pellet propulsion seems to me to require a large, durable infrastucture, which is to say dread socialism and its piles of skulls, whereas a ramjet can be owned by a small band of ideologically solid libertarians.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

At some point I need to talk about authoritarian governments in SF that nevertheless allow their people surprisingly casual access to WMDs.

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

Money talks. Dad Rico was the Lee Iacoca of his day, so he got to spout off about useless citizenship, the "Ethics of Madness" guy was likewise a big shot space industry executive, so was given light enough supervision to make off with a customer's ramscoop.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I had remembered him as an 'owns car dealerships' guy rather than a notable industrialist - but it's been a while. It seemed to me that being comfortable middle class lumpenprolitariat was part of the point.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

A WMD-armed society is a really, really, really polite society.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

Right up until it isn't.

[connactic.livejournal.com]

I am pretty sure the local Belter anarcho-capatilists would be more than willing to sell you all the fissionables you want.

[nebogipfel.livejournal.com]

Well, health insurance is expensive out there

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

How well does this correlate with the use of Light sails for the prime mover? Offhand, I can't think of too many authors who used it for interstellar travel, but the ones who did . . .

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

Light sail:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=light+sail&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=16&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Clight%20sail%3B%2Cc0

solar sail:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=solar+sail&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=16&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csolar%20sail%3B%2Cc0

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Both together! (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=solar+sail%2C+light+sail&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=16&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csolar%20sail%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Clight%20sail%3B%2Cc0)

Now with electric propulsion & ion drives!

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

light sail, solar sail, ion drive & electric propulsion

Re: Now with electric propulsion & ion drives!

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Generation ship or sleeper ship are also low.
Warp drive crushes them all.
Wormhole crushes warp drive.
Warp crushes wormhole.

link

Ftl is about level with warp drive.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Huh, the huge 1980-92 jump for solar sail is definitely odd, I wonder what caused the rise and then the drop.

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

There was the Coumbus 500 Solar Sail Cup which was supposed to fly in 1992 (500 years since Columbus). Also Friedman had led an attempt to do solar sails for the Haley's Comet rendezvous before NASA cut the mission (they settled on an ion drive instead). he went off and popularized it at that point.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Of course, their cousin the mag sail remains a truly awesome breaking system, which would drastically drop interstellar fuel requirements. It also seems likely that a system where a ramjet was paired with an antimatter drive would work quite well. Keep the antimatter onboard, collect the matter, and if you mixed them as a ratio of 1 part antimatter to 25 parts matter, you'd get an energy conversion of something like 10X fusion, which might be enough to make the drive considerably more viable.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

"Interstellar ramjet" follows a trajectory similar to "Bussard ramjet."

"Ramscoop" is more popular than either. I'd thought it might pertain to dragsters or something, but no. It is exclusively Niven's in the Sixties but (trying a different corpus) begins to leak into nonfiction and into other SF in the Seventies.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

The Bussard ramjet had a long life compared to his high-gain, cheap & cheerful Riggatron for terrestrial fusion power.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

The currently active bit of Bussard-woo is, of course, the Polywell.

(My theory on that is that the government is funding it as a honeypot for spies.)

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

C'mon, man -- if 2 x 10^30 kg of dumb ol' hydrogen can sustain fusion without an exquisitely sculpted potential and very rapid handwaving to prevent thermalization, how hard can it be?

I say pop a polywell in a Skylon, get out past the moon, and fire up the Cannae drive!

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

I don't know how to Ngram it, but how many stories feature fast - but not FTL - travel? And how many rely on slow -- ~0.01 c or slower - travel? Hmmm . . . subcategory: slow travel plus full automation. I can think of precisely on generation story I've read in recent years, McCleod's Learning the World.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

That's not even a full generation ship. The adults are immortal and lived or slept through the journey; they just happen to be raising some kids in the volume emptied out by reaction mass near the end.

That seems the more common approach. Alastair Reynolds is full of sleeper/immortality/time dilation mix. The colony ships in Chasm City, the Ultras and Conjoiners, _House of Suns_. Stross has his two robot novels.

MacLeod's Engines of Light took the unusual "exactly as fast as light" dodge, avoiding both relativity violations and the energetics of NAFAL.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I liked that book, particularly the alien space bats, but Amend Locke says he has no plans for a sequel. Oh well. :)